#LegalOpsGoals: A Modern Legal Department by 2022
The rate of digital transformation with most organizations today is accelerating rapidly. Teams are experiencing an increasing demand to deploy technologies and demonstrate ROI for new systems. In FTI Consulting’s 2021 Resilience Barometer survey, 37% of respondents said they feel extreme pressure to integrate technology over the next 12 months and 44% said they feel significant pressure to do so.
Legal departments are in no way exempt from this trend. Amid expectations for in-house counsel to drive busines value and increase efficiencies, chief legal officers are hiring legal operations professionals to modernize the department and help tech adoption and process improvements. Given that most legal departments are fraught with deeply rooted legacy practices and systems, this is no easy task.
The number of legal departments with at least one in-house legal operations position has grown by nearly 75% since 2018. At least half of all legal departments today have someone in this role. Yet many legal operations professionals continue to face roadblocks stemming from resistance to change, budget constraints, technology shortcomings, scalability and other process issues.
To help accelerate the modernization effort and avoid pitfalls, FTI Technology has created a guide to help legal operations professionals achieve their benchmarks and make real, near-term progress on modernization efforts.
The guide provides key steps and considerations across people, process, technology and data risks. It addresses:
- Best practices for aligning strategy and planning with the reality of the legal department
- A checklist for conducting in-depth assessments
- How, when and why to bring in outside services
- The building blocks for an accurate and actionable legal spend analysis and how to benchmark ROI
- Key components of a legal technology roadmap, including matter management, legal hold, e-discovery, contract management, e-billing and other software
- Tips for promoting adoption of advanced analytics
- What to look for in product and services vendors
- How legalops professionals can incorporate information governance to reduce risk and add greater value to the business
- Cross-department stakeholders who can support legalops efforts
The legal department has become a strategic business operation. As such, technology modernization will be critical to ongoing value and success. To better position your team for achieving #LegalOpsGoals, download the guide, In-House Legal Technology Modernization: Considerations and Best Practices.
The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of FTI Consulting, its management, its subsidiaries, its affiliates, or its other professionals.